With small and medium business and enterprise clients ranging from its Tamworth headquarters location to Far West Orana and South East Queensland, managed services provider Toim Technology took home number 4 in the CRN Fast50 2022.
The company’s managing director Tom Gayford spoke to CRN Australia in late 2022, where he shared that Toim’s 196 per cent revenue growth in the 2021 to 2022 financial year was not due to any strategy change.
Rather, tailoring all of Toim’s operations — recruitments, offerings, sales — to the needs of regional clients was finally paying off.
“As a startup professional services business, penetration into the market has been a slow process requiring a long sales cycle to build trust and leveraging each acquisition as social proof into securing the next,” Gayford said.
When Gayford and Toim's former director Tim Wood founded the managed services provider after leaving their roles at Telstra’s channel business in 2019, they understood reputation was everything in small communities.
“We're not here to burn a bridge or make a quick buck. We are after very long-term committed business partnerships."
According to Gayford, one reason for Toim’s revenue nearly tripling to over three million in the 2021 to 2022 financial year, was that he hired employees who could manage long-term relationships.
“I'm not after having 15 salespeople to go chase the next quarterly commission. And I don't have any single employee in my business that's incentivised, as such.”
Gayford spoke about metropolitan ICT providers.
“A lot of the personal touch about it is gone. Especially with the rise of SaaS-based apps. People expect just a few buttons and to provision a few things. Our customers and target market highly value the local feel and touch we offer,” he said.
While rising operating costs and talent sparsity have pushed many ICT services providers to hire offshore, Toim invested in upskilling employees who grew up in the area and had the familiarity and social skills to support Tamworth-based clients.
“You can train technical skills; you can't train personality. Quite a few of our young guys who started when they were 18 or 19 came from fast food or retail, where soft skills really matter.
“They’re fast-paced, pretty good under pressure, and good at communication because that's what they had to do. And then they're learning the tech skills.
“We do not externally recruit for leadership positions within Toim but strive to internally develop the required skillsets to fuel our strong growth,” Gayford added.
Gayford said that, in regional areas, managed service providers, with broad technology stacks, won out over providers of specialist ICT products and services.
“It’s a bit different from being in Sydney or Melbourne or any other capital city or large population centre. There are not a lot of specialists there.
“You can't come to Tamworth and go, I want my help desk company, my security company, my fibre company, my network company, my voice company — that just doesn't exist.
“And so, we've been very strategic in ensuring we've got simple products that work well together. Our whole stack integrates, everything from voice to networks.
“We ensure we've got people in the team who can do a bit of everything, but there are also specialists — like their level three or level two support — in certain fields.”
There was strong demand for Toim’s cyber security and private cloud offerings, Gayford said.
Toim’s security solutions include assisting organisations to become certified in security frameworks, which had supported Toim’s government-funded, not-for-profit clients.
“There are very particular cybersecurity requirements to meet federal department's criteria to receive funding and stay in programs.
“And we've realised a gap in helping people go through their ISO 27001 certifications and things like that.
“We've got a whole program that we've developed to take on a company, help them develop all the programs and security controls or documentation, including staff training, to put people through ISO 27001.”
Toim has also incorporated Leading Edge Data Centre’s Tier 3 Tamworth data centre, which opened in 2021, into its private cloud offerings.
“Our private cloud is the first regionally based offering in a Tier 3 data centre in Australia,” Gayford said.
In 2021, Toim deployed Encoo to build high-speed fibre connections to the Tamworth data centre for a regional job services provider, car dealership JT Fossey and several manufacturing clients.
“When it comes to manufacturing if you're from where we are your internet’s slow, if your servers are on-premise, they can go offline, and there's a lot of power events in regional Australia,” Gayford said.
“And so, manufacturing is a prime example of a vertical that uses our cloud service offering,” he added.
“One of the manufacturers we have has used that offering to allow them to have robots building stuff. The robots, using the architecture of our cloud, our fibre and our network, don't go offline at 4am when the power goes off.”
“The software is only 0.2 milliseconds away in the data centre, even though it's across town as opposed to 10 to 15 milliseconds away down in Sydney or Melbourne.”
Gayford said that they had also provided the private cloud offering to other businesses outside of Tamworth using different data centres.
“We have other pops around the country - we've got a pop in Dubbo. And they use that cloud in Dubbo of ours that we've deployed and configured, and they get the same experience.”
“People that have a large sprawling organisation can have bits in each different pop. And depending on where they want it and what's close to the end user.”
As Toim won more clients in areas like Dubbo, Toowoomba, Newcastle and Wagga Wagga, Gayford commented on how the business was dealing with this.
“We make sure that we don't turn into a helpdesk in Tamworth where we only drive out if you've got a problem that we can't fix remotely.”
He said that Toim has a “really big focus on going to the site. Not to the point of a detriment, but every single customer; they've got to see us every month.”
“We want to ensure that people get the same experience no matter where they're located, which means that we want to replicate that model,” Gayford added.
Toim has one Newcastle-based employee where the company has a number of clients, and is currently in the process of setting up a remote office in Dubbo.
“They like to know that you are part of the local fabric in the local community and you're reinvesting in their community. You’re not just here to take their money back to some other local government area.”
Gayford added that “About 18 months ago I said to our sales guy that if we were in the five or top 10 of the Fast50, I’d buy him a car. I'm regretting that now because I think I might have said I’d buy him a Ford Mustang, but oh well.”
Applications are now open for the 2023 CRN Fast50!
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